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ALCOTT, A. Bronson

TABLE TALK

1877. Item #66684

ALCOTT, A. Bronson. TABLE-TALK. Boston: Robert Brothers, 1877. First edition. xii,178, + [2] pp. publisher's adv. 12mo. Publisher's binding; terra-cotta cloth, bevelled boards, gilt-stamped title to spine and upper boards, decorative wrap-around frieze gilt-stamped at top-edge, brown coated endpapers, t.e.g. A fine copy, with just a touch of edgewear at heel and crown, and some light soiling to cloth. (BAL 117). In addition, this volume has the ink ownership of Mrs. Daniel Lothrop (1844-1924) on the first blank; she is best-known by her pseudonym Margaret Sidney, the author of the children's classic The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. She was the wife of Daniel Lothrop (1831-1892), the Boston publisher, and a resident of Concord, MA, beginning in 1883. The verso of the ffep. has a full-page note by F. B. Sanborn (1831-1917), who was a school teacher in Concord, where his students included the children of Emerson, Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr.; his relationship with the Transcendentalists resulted in the publication of many books about members of that circle, including A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (1893), written with W. T. Harris. Sanborn has written: "This was never real Table-Talk but was made up from Mr. A's Diaries and loose Mss. ...and indicates the immensity of br A's reading, in which he went beyond Emerson...;" he continues by mentioning when and where the book was written, below which he signed his initials "F.B.S."